


Waiting for a Whale

by Caedmaeg



Category: The Decoy Bride (2011)
Genre: Gen, I have so many laird feelings, One Shot, Pining!Laird, Pining!William, also one literal whale, metaphorical whales
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-12
Updated: 2016-03-12
Packaged: 2018-05-26 07:48:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,936
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6229867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caedmaeg/pseuds/Caedmaeg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The laird is not too young to remember the whale, and not too old to hope for another to arrive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Waiting for a Whale

**Author's Note:**

> One thing I didn’t understand until the 5th time watching this movie (and the 2nd or 3rd time looking at the cast list on IMDB) is that “Laird” is an honorific, given in this case to a man whose first name is “William.” Thus, “a young woman and her laird save the island…” doesn’t refer to Katie and William as being in a relationship (except in William’s dreams), but simply that he is laird to everyone. 
> 
> Meanwhile, I imagine that Steve wouldn't give his true surname while arranging Lara's secret wedding, hence him suddenly being Steven Wilson instead of Steven Korbitz.
> 
> I’m uncertain when TDB is supposed to take place, so my headcanon is that Lara and James made their first assay at a wedding in late May 2011, and the decoy situation happens sometime in June. Thus James asking “It finally got dark, then?” as the sun sets after 10 PM in June.

God, but weddings were depressing.

 

It might not be so bad for the younger generation – they could sit at ease and relish their youth, confident their chance would come, or else ignore the institution to pursue flings or relationships without any pretense of permanence – but William was always conscious of his desire to be standing up there on the right, making a vow before everyone, with someone making vows in return.  Always, always.

He’d sat in this same pew some two dozen times instead, alone, increasingly aware that the chances of finding a companion to sit with him were dwindling down to nothing.   _Were_ nothing, actually; Muireen was the last unmarried woman under 50 on Hegg, for another half-hour.

 _And then there were none_ , he thought, and would have sat musing on the similarities between Hegg and Soldier Island, except that the door burst open and the organ struck up the wedding march.

The whole church turned to look at the bride.  Except it wasn’t the bride.  It was a soaking wet Katie Nic Aiodh: Katie, who’d sworn she’d never come back to Hegg; Katie, who was engaged in Edinburgh, or had been; Katie, wrapped in Aileen’s all-encompassing shawl and apologetically stopping the organ.  She’d spotted Angus and given him a small wave, just as Muireen herself entered, vexed to be upstaged and hissing _He’s mine now_.

The dreams that suddenly swelled up at that claim made the ceremony far more tolerable.

~

Afterward, the rain over and the rice thrown, William made his way around the churchyard.  The happy couple received his congratulations first, but he sidled up to Katie as soon as convenient.  Just to learn a bit more about what had happened, of course.  She couched it in careful terms, but he could read between the lines.  “Continuing the theme of my public humiliation” was an elliptical version of groveling at his feet.  “I may need my old job back” meant “I most _certainly_ need my old job back.”

“I ran out of ways to describe pockets” was harder to parse, but landed somewhere between “I ran out on my fiancé, who considered fidelity overrated” and “I ran out of the office following a _truly_ spectacular meltdown upon discovery of his indiscretions.”  Most likely, anyway.  So he responded to the subtext:   _If you don’t mind me saying, you’ve always had such terrible taste in men_.  It was true, after all, even leaving his continuing bachelorhood out of it; she never was one to go for the decent-and-faithful type.

Morag interrupted his cautious invitation of Katie to dance with a stern finger and a reminder of Hegg law.  As though he could forget the bloody Hegg law dictating that the laird dance with every woman in attendance, eldest to youngest.  As though he’d _ever_ forget what it had cost him back in ’84.

The estimate of 4:30 in the morning was hyperbolic, these days, but it didn’t matter: when he’d finished the first five dances, Katie was gone.

~

Back home, he plodded to the wardrobe and wearily hung up his jacket, removed his ghillie brogues, detached his flashes, peeled off his kilt hose, unhooked his belt and sporran, and put away his kilt.  Unless something truly miraculous happened, it’d be the last time he attended a wedding in it.  Hopefully Callum wouldn’t bother to invite him if he did indeed get married at age 18 eight years hence.

Somehow this disappointment of a day hung even heavier because he’d missed the hoped-for dance with Katie.  It reminded him too much of Anna’s wedding.  The mention of Hegg law reminded him too much of Siubhan and New Years, 1985.

As ever, he lay awake in bed and thought back to the whale.

 

It had washed up on the beach in 1972.  There was nothing to be done to return it to the water; no one had the means to push 50 or 60 tons of whale anywhere, not in one piece.  The islanders descended upon it.  Those without a rusty inheritance of whaling tools rigged up their own mincing knives and blubber hooks and trypots.

The rosiest spectacles of reminiscence couldn’t obscure how disgusting the process had been from start to finish: slicing up blankets of blubber, rendering it, butchering the meat, cooking or smoking it, cleaning the bones in hopes of carving or trading them (ah, glorious days before the regulations changed)...it was greasy, smelly, and generally offensive. 

But the _money_.  The beauty of the whale was that Hegg had gotten a charter in centuries past, so that no monarch, minister, or mayor had any claim to a beached whale or sturgeon.  No one had any claim to it except for the islanders themselves, and no one would keep each able-bodied dweller of Hegg from claiming his or her pound of flesh.  So to speak.

The casks of rendered oil, the bottled spermaceti, the 5 kilos of nascent ambergris...there’d been thousands of pounds, suddenly, from a French perfumery and various industrial interests.  It was headying to be 18 years old and have such income - a glorious triumph, even when stinking of the fetid blubber and blood, to be recognized by everyone for how much back-breaking labor he’d put in.

He strained to catch an echo of that feeling, to let it carry him into dreams, instead of remembering the rest.  If only Katie could see _that_ version of him, instead of what faced him from the mirror: a mildly ridiculous face, hanging in ever heavier folds; hair not behaving as it used to; increasingly sticklike legs under a burgeoning waistline.

How could he show her something so far in the past?

If only another whale would come!  If only the tide would turn in his favor like it did then...

Ever-madder schemes to bring it about slid him into sleep.  

~

A thought flared in his brain as he woke.   _The whale!  The whale!_  It went on like an alarm clock as he rose, made tea, and got out the Weetabix.  Gradually he noticed the blink of the answering machine keeping time with it.  

“Hello.  I’m looking for William Douglas, the owner of Morton Castle.  This is a fairly urgent business matter, so please call me back as soon as possible.”  Left at 7 last night, it looked like.  Odd.  It’d been 26 years since he’d even set foot in the castle, and all of Hegg knew it.  The caller was clearly American, though.  Why was an American calling about his castle?

He rang back.  “Er, hello, this is William Douglas returning your call - “

“Mr. Douglas!  Excellent to hear back from you.”  The voice slid, just a touch oily, over his ears.  “I’m Steven Wilson, and I work with an international marketing firm.  GoMarkets Limited.  We’re planning a conference so that our American, Scottish, and English branches can all have a bit of a roundtable together.  I know this is fairly short notice, but we were hoping to rent your castle for the week.”

William lowered the phone, the better to blink at it a bit, then returned it to a useful position.  “My castle?”  
  
“Yes, you’re on record as the owner of Morton Castle, on the island of Hegg?”  

“Well, that’s true,”  William replied, unsure how to say “ _but it’s falling apart after 26 years of neglect_ ” without putting the American off renting it.  “Yes, I’m the laird around here.  Erm.  It could use a bit of a sweep.”

Steven Wilson seemed unbothered.  “We’d be delighted to do a bit of maintenance as needed, Mr. Douglas.  Would that suit you?”

He named a figure.  William’s eyebrows flew up.  A week!  They were welcome to it for a month at that rate.  A year, even.  God knows he hadn’t done much with it in decades.

“Right.  And your e-mail is - ?  Great.  We’ll be seeing you _very_ soon.  Thanks so much.”  

He rang off, and William was left sitting heavily at his kitchen table, his tea growing cold as he wondered what just happened.  Who just - why - how -

And then the thought came back.   _The whale!  The whale!_  Here it was, landed at last.  Less putrid - less effort all around, really - but this conference would be 2011’s whale, the thing bringing pounds and prosperity to Hegg, nearly 40 years later.  His castle would be at the _very center_ of it.  The time had come to sweep away the worst of his memories of the thing - that bloody party and all that followed - to create new ones.  Ideas began to percolate.  An international marketing conference meant money from outside - he could order more creature comforts for the shop to sell - travel-sized toiletries and so on.  Hegg-themed trinkets, postcards, magnets.  Different kinds of pens, notepads, coffee varieties.

An epiphany struck: instead of just recounting his past to Katie, he’d set her a project - one useful to these marketing types, apt to bring in funds.  Her own thrift would prod her to do it, and her characteristic thoroughness would prompt her to consult various authorities.  And then he could tell her all about the whale, the castle, his most glorious days, all of it in a thoroughly casual way.  The castle wasn’t at its most impressive, and neither was he, but if she could look at him through the lens of the past...

Brilliant.  Just brilliant!

Steven Wilson, bless his peculiar conference-hosting ideas, had sent a confirmation e-mail.  William printed it out and grabbed a small sheaf of printer paper, stacking it beneath his extra typewriter.  He had a historical guidebook to suggest, and a girl to impress.

~

Unfortunately, Katie didn’t impress easily.

“Don’t be mad. ‘Come see our disused toilet that may or may not be haunted by the ghost of a drowned cow!’”    
  
Ahhh, the drowned cow joke.  That was an old one, a chestnut of a prank the boys had played since the building was put up in the ‘70s, mooing spookily if they heard a girl enter the small cubicle while they hid in the large one.   _The Ornithologist’s Wife_ labeling the building a ‘wildlife center’ had breathed new life into it.  “You see?  We need to channel this raw creative energy.  Else you’re liable to get restless and go wandering off again!”  No harm in letting her know she’d be missed.

“Nobody’s going to buy a guidebook to Hegg.  Unless it’s cheaper than our toilet paper!”  Which was fair, as she knew neither his alleged nor his private reasons for suggesting such a project.  He handed her the event poster Steve had sent him in explanation.  

Aileen and Morag’s entrance just bolstered his hopes.  It _was_ the whale all over again.  “Now, Katie, chop chop. Chapter One, in which a young woman and her laird rescue their island from certain doom by writing a brilliant guidebook!”  

He realized abruptly that he was actually giving away the plot of his _own_ book.  Plus that part was supposed to be chapter 10 or so.  

William beat a retreat before he revealed any more plot points.  Katie still looked skeptical, but he heard the click of keys before he left the shop.  

~

A few days later, she handed him a draft.  It wasn’t very long, and it wasn’t quite what he’d hoped for, history or research-wise.  But it _was_ practical information for visitors, and he worked to get it copied quickly; he took the earliest ferry to the Stornoway printers shop, so as to get as many as possible into the hands of the _marketeers_.  At 5 pounds a copy, and some 7 or 8 dozen copies...  it was fairly easy money, over 200 pounds for each of them.

  
There was just the small matter of the marketeers being journalists. 

Not that most of the islanders cared - money was money, whether it came from the photographer, the advertiser, or anyone else.  But William was concerned.  He’d heard about the conference being some Hollywood star’s secret wedding, and that Katie had gotten mixed up in it somehow, while Iseabail had mysteriously shown up with thousands of pounds in cash.  Later on Katie had introduced some fellow in Conor Meaghaid’s old clothes to Caleb and Mairhead as her _husband_.

Reverend McDonagh revealed that this James Arber had dissolved his accidental marriage to Katie (idiot!).  It was cold comfort, considering that Katie had left, too.

For succeed the guide book had, all too well: the journalists had liked her prose rather more than they’d liked Hegg, appreciating how straightforward she was about its limitations as much as she praised its attractions.  So it transpired that before she and Iseabail left for their well-funded world tour, Katie had had no fewer than twenty calls asking her to write something, anything: something bracingly honest but delightfully earnest at once.  Apparently she’d brokered it into a deal to write guide books to other destinations, which, it must be admitted, gave far more scope than a single island of the Outer Hebrides.

He wondered if she’d come back when Iseabail was gone.  Peculiar to think that no one expected to see Iseabail again; she’d really fixated on that throw-me-into-a-live volcano plan.  The farewell party had been a little subdued because of how determinedly she’d said all her goodbyes.

 

The summer, for all that it didn’t involve back-breaking labor or rendering of whale blubber, was hard for him.  Lara Tyler and her crew had packed up, and so had the journalists, and so had the Nic Aoidh women.  Every once in a while, he stood atop the cliffs of Whale Beach and looked over them mournfully, for the whale was gone.  There could not possibly come another.

But the sudden influx of journalists taking flights and the ferry to Hegg in June meant that the island was added to some list of 25 Travel Destinations You Never Knew Existed.  A steady stream of holidaymakers, especially kayakers and hikers, kept turning up.  Enough of them wanted to tour or lodge in the castle that he began looking into the price of renovation and restoration.  It had always felt like too much to contemplate, but whatever mad things the Americans had managed to do to the castle and grounds within 72 hours gave him a bit of a leg up.  

Between the shop, the castle, and his writing, the year passed.  His new historical romance sold a respectable number of electronic copies.  He dropped Katie the occasional note, and received the very occasional reply.  The chance to impress her with his younger triumphs never materialized, not as he'd hoped, though she did ask for a bit more information about the castle.  A few months after she left, he received a copy of the second edition.  It didn’t really add much, but he could still read between the lines: the abuse hurled on James Arber’s head could only mean that the dissolution of the fake marriage had hurt a lot more than she’d let on.

 

If he weren’t a man of business, he’d stop selling Arber’s books on that account.  But the new one was almost as slender as Katie’s second edition, and this new volume made for better bathroom reading than bathroom paper.  He read it, once, and tried very hard not to think about how much the protagonist’s love interest resembled Katie.

She returned in a whirlwind of activity - packing things into storage, skirting discussion of Iseabail’s burial, selling the Sunshine, collecting her share of recent guidebook profits - and just as he started to hope she’d stay, announced where her next contract would take her.  

It was a day without rain when she left, which would prove truly inconvenient if he couldn’t keep his face under control.  He went to fetch the whisky, as much to comfort himself as to salute her.  Morag and Aileen did their best to give him an opening: they handed Katie one of their little stone faces, decorated to resemble a bride insofar as the stone people ever resembled anything.  It was too late, probably, - no, definitely, there she went, taking her trusty wheeled luggage with her.

How many times could he watch her leave?

It suddenly became a very good day to visit Whale Beach.  The rocks were too dangerous for the ferry to come anywhere near it, so he wouldn’t see her boat getting further and further away.  At first he stared blankly across the water, then idly watched the seagulls and puffins.  The waves filled his ears with white noise, broken only by the distant cry of birds.  Quite lulling in its way.  He squinted out into the sea, straining to look for fish, for seals, for a whale.

And so he might have continued doing, had he not heard a shout.  A figure in a teal jacket was struggling out of a kayak down among the rocks.  

He made his way, not without caution, down to the beach.  “Hello!” called the woman, dragging her kayak behind her.  “I seem to have breached my hull.  D’you think you could help me get it back to the rental center?”

She looked rueful at the damage to her boat, but smiled up at him as he stopped before her.  Auburn hair flecked with gray fell in front of her eyes, and she impatiently tucked it back into her helmet.  “Jean,” she said, holding up a hand to shake.    
  
“William,” he replied.  “Here, this path over here is probably the best way up - ”

As she followed him up the path, walked beside him all the way back to the harbor, and joined him for strupak, all he could think was _It’s the whale!  It's the whale all over again_.

**Author's Note:**

> This story got me researching whaling, Scottish castles, clan tartans, and the daylight hours in the Hebrides. However, I'm still not Scottish/British/European, so by all means correct any errors I've made, either factual or semantic. Or anything else, for that matter. All feedback is welcomed!
> 
> Hope you enjoyed reading!


End file.
